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Psychology in UX

Summary: Designers, developers, and even UX researchers fall prey to the false-consensus effect, projecting their behaviors and reactions onto users.
Definition: The false-consensus effect refers to people’s tendency to assume that others share their beliefs and will behave similarly in a given context. Only people who are very different from them would make different choices.
The false-consensus effect was first defined in 1977 by Ross, Greene, and House. They showed that unlike scientists, “layperson psychologists” (that is, all of us who are put into the position to guess how others would behave) tend to overestimate how many people share their choices, values, and judgments, and perceive alternate responses as rare, deviant, and more revealing of the responders.

A thoughtful examination of empathy in life and in the context of design reveals that empathy is not merely about receiving, but also about giving. The word “empathy” is a translation of a German word “einfühlung.” Einfühlung was a word invented to explain how it is that people can come to experience a sense of unity (often referred to as “oneness”) with a piece of artwork. It describes an experience where the boundary between the objectified “self” and “other” blurs without completely disappearing. A metaphor often used to describe the experience was an “entering into” an art object, be it a painting, a sculpture, a novel, or a performance. The metaphor is still used to this day when we speak of “stepping into” other people’s shoes.

The next loop of User Experience is about designing for persuasion, emotion, and trust. You still need good usability, but it’s often not enough to design a website that is easy to understand, navigate, and interact. Just because people can do something does not guarantee that they will — they must be motivated and persuaded to make decisions that lead to conversion. PET Design is rooted in social psychology and it’s pioneered by Human Factors Inc. It complements classic usability and user experience best practice. In this article I’m going to give an overview of Design for Persuasion, Emotion and Trust (PET Design) and take a look at some PET techniques in detail.

Human Cognition

Color is an integral element of our world, not just in the natural environment but also in the man-made architectural environment. Color always played a role in the human evolutionary process. The environment and its colors are perceived, and the brain processes and judges what it perceives on an objective and subjective basis. Psychological influence, communication, information, and effects on the psyche are aspects of our perceptual judgment processes. Hence, the goals of color design in an architectural space are not relegated to decoration alone.

The concept of an affordance was coined by the perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson in his seminal book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. The concept was introduced to the HCI community by Donald Norman in his book The Psychology of Everyday Things from 1988. There has however been ambiguity in Norman's use of the concept, and the concept thus requires a more elaborate explanation.

Conversational UI

Read the headlines and you’ll find that chatbots are en vogue right now — everyone wants one! But despite being popular for brands and businesses, consumers are just now getting accustomed to the new conversational medium. Bot makers must treat users with care so they aren’t scared off.
An important part of the chatbot design process is to account for chatbot UX. While maintaining a bot’s functions is necessary, it means little if chatbot UX design is poor. Below are chatbot UX tips to ensure your bot is fun, inviting and easy to use for new and veteran users.

Books and Resources 📖

Machine learning will cause us to rethink, restructure, displace, and consider new possibilities for virtually every experience we build. In the Google UX community, we’ve started an effort called “human-centered machine learning” (HCML) to help focus and guide that conversation. During this talk, we’ll explain how we look across products at Google to see how ML can stay grounded in human needs while solving them in unique ways only possible through ML. Our goal is for every designer to understand core ML concepts, how to integrate ML into the UX utility belt, and ensure ML and AI are built in an inclusive way.